Funny Dream

I had a funny dream last night:

I guess I had won a contest or something because I was scheduled to accompany a space shuttle crew on one of their missions.  I was pretty stoked about it – my son-in-law taught me that word, stoked — and was trying to make mental plans for how to snap some good photographs through the shuttle’s little portal window once I got into orbit.  But then my doctor called to inform me that I had a condition that could basically end my life at any moment.  I was pretty sure this would disqualify me from the shuttle mission, and that made me sad.

So (still dreaming, and therefore magically transported) I was standing and talking to some friends at my church telling them about the lost shuttle mission and the impending death, and this wonderful woman — I know who it was in the dream, but it could just as easily have been any of my wonderful friends from church — was telling me how very sorry she was, and I said something ridiculous like “Don’t worry about it.  Everybody’s gotta die sometime!” Then my head started to shake, sort of a Parkinson’s kind of shaking, and it was definitely the beginnings of a seizure, and my balance started to fail me, and I started to fall.  I felt my friends catching me, and I couldn’t speak to tell them to just let go.

That’s when I woke from the dream and began the process of staring at my ceiling for hours on end, thinking about the dream and its possible meanings, and memorizing the dark shadows in the nighttime version of our bedroom until the sun started to rise.  (This was not the kind of dream you want to have on a regular basis.)

I’m only 50 years old, or I will be in a few weeks.  I suppose increased thoughts of mortality are to be expected at such milestones, but I suspect my dream last night was also triggered by the loss of my father-in-law one month ago.  My own father, a very good father, died when I was 20, so my father-in-law became the father of my adult years, covering the second half of my life thus far.  He, also, was a very good father.

Dogs are simple and pure, so the grief after losing them is immediate.  But when a person close to me dies, the grief is often delayed.  I need time to reflect, to carefully examine the person’s life (as I knew it), to think about the things he or she cared about, the people he loved, the things he did and the things he never got to experience (such as space flight).

Then the night comes, usually weeks later, when I can finally cry, sometimes after waking from a dream, the dam finally breaking, the quiet tears soaking into my pillow and cleansing some part of my soul.

Billy Jack, 1930-2008